A bare statement of the treatment
she received from them is surely no proof of conscious degradation.
In a letter to a Welsh neighbour, near the end of her life, some time
in 1818, she says:
"Mrs. Mostyn (her youngest daughter) has written again on the road
back to Italy, where she likes the Piozzis above all people, she
says, _if they were not so proud of their family_. Would not that
make one laugh two hours before one's own death? But I remember when
Lady Egremont raised the whole nation's ill will here, while the
Saxons were wondering how Count Bruhle could think of marrying a lady
born Miss Carpenter. The Lombards doubted in the meantime of my being
a gentlewoman by birth, because my first husband was a brewer. A
pretty world, is it not? A Ship of Fooles, according to the old poem;
and they will upset the vessel by and by."
This is not the language of one who wished to apologise for a
misalliance.
As to Piozzi's assumed want of youth and good looks, Johnson's
knowledge of womankind, to say nothing of his self-love, should have
prevented him from urging this as an insuperable objection. He might
have recollected the Roman matron in Juvenal, who considers the world
well lost for an old and disfigured prize-fighter; or he might have
quoted Spenser's description of one--
"Who rough and rude and filthy did appear,
Unseemly man to please fair lady's eye,
Yet he of ladies oft was loved dear,
When fairer faces were bid standen by:
Oh! who can tell the bent of woman's phantasy?"
Madame Campan, speaking of Caroline of Naples, the sister of Marie
Antoinette, says, she had great reason to complain of the insolence
of a Spaniard named Las Casas, whom the king, her father-in-law, had
sent to persuade her to remove M.
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